The Night Remembers

40

The first shot tore a piece of elm bark off two feet to my right and came less than a minute after I left the cabin. Falling to my left, behind a chunk of granite boulder, I saw David up near the timberline. Even from here, he gave the impression of being frantic. He turned, stumbled, and continued his way up into the hills.

I gave him half a minute and then I went after him, weaving my way at an angle up the slope, keeping low and always looking for a glimpse of his blue sleeveless down jacket.

Within five minutes, the cold started to get bad again. I could feel my sinuses begin to plug up and my eyes to tear. By now, I stalked him along the crest of a cove, the river far below gray and cold. I had no idea where he was going and I doubt he did, either.

Spotting him, I dropped to my knee, slammed my hands into the cup-and-saucer for firing, and was seconds away from a warning shot when a deer appeared along the trail above me, blocking my shot. Any other time, the tawny-colored creature, beautiful even on this drab, overcast day, would have been worth approaching just to pet. Today she was an annoyance. I threw a rock to scatter her and then started weaving upslope again, thinking I was closing in on him now.

At the top of the hill, he let go three shots that put me flat on the ground, behind a rusted-out garbage can used by picnickers in the summer. There was a pavilion twenty yards away and it was from there, hiding behind tables that had been upended and tied together for the winter months, that he did his firing.

Knowing this was the only chance I’d have, I rolled back down the hill a few feet, got up on my haunches, and started running as hard as I could in that uncomfortable position, angling for the backside of the pavilion.

I was halfway there when I heard the shout. Then there were two shouts, one of them belonging to David. The other I was still not sure of.

Out of breath now, I fell to my knees behind the green chemical toilet the state park folks had planted here in the woods. I had a good view of the tables David hid behind, and an opportunity to wound him if he showed himself at all.

The second shout came again, and when I turned and saw whose voice it was, my stomach tightened and a chill sweat covered my upper body.

Carolyn Pennyfeather, dressed in blue down jacket and Levi’s like her brother, came up over the top of the hill, waving and shouting.

“Please, David; please just come back to the cabin and talk to me.”

“You know better than that, Carolyn. You know what’s going to happen to me.”

“Please,” she said. “Please, David.”

All the time she talked, she moved wide in an easterly course so that she would eventually emerge directly in front of him. Her gloved hands were spread wide, as if she wanted to take him to her, and even from here I could hear the tears in her voice.

The pavilion had a pitched roof and railings painted silver. In the back was a big kitchen. In the summer there would be Japanese lanterns of red and blue and green strung here and caught in the soft breeze, and young couples on fire with love and lust, and grandkids parked on the knees of grandpas and grandmas. There would have been square dancing and beer kegs exploding with foam and the clang of horseshoes in progress. But now, in that terrible death that comes each autumn, there was just the cold and the dead, stripped trees and low, flat coffin-lid of sky.

He fired at her and it startled me. He didn’t mean to kill her, of course, but that he fired at all meant that he was much more frightened and unbalanced than I’d imagined.

She just stood there, listening to the crack of rifleshot and the crackle of echo a few moments later. It scared her and you could see on the soft lines of her lovely face the first inkling that this was not the brother David she knew and loved. This was a stranger.

“She’s trying to help you, David,” I called as I came out from behind the green toilet.

I waited for his shot, and when it came I ducked and dropped to one knee.

She started running toward the pavilion. This time he didn’t fire but let her come all the way under the roof, her footsteps slapping hollowly on the concrete floor.

I saw him lean out from behind the tables. She grabbed him by the head and shoulders and yanked him into her arms. She began sobbing immediately.

She gave me just the moment I needed, and I moved quickly, running hard up to the pavilion, edging closer along David’s blind side and getting my .38 directly in line with his head.

I let them hold each other until David, too, started crying, and then I said, “Please give me your rifle, David. Now.”

He started to get angry, to whirl away from her and put his weapon on me, but she blocked him, falling toward him so that he could not fire.

“Please, David; please. He’s just trying to help.”

From there, it was little trouble getting his rifle, turning him toward the river, starting him down the hill. I said nothing, just let Carolyn hold his arm and hug him as they moved downslope between the hardwoods.

“You know what they’re going to do to me.” David kept saying over and over. “I’ll never get out of prison. Never.”

“David, just try and calm down. Please.”

“You don’t understand, Carolyn. None of you ever did. Ever.”

When the cabin came into sight, Lisa and George Pennyfeather stood in the front yard, staring upslope at us. Lisa looked as if she wanted to wave, one of those cheery flags of social-greeting poise she was so good at producing, but then her hand faltered when she saw my .38 trained on David’s back, and she started crying and put her head on George’s shoulder.

The worst part of arresting anybody in a domestic situation is the grief and anger of the other family members. The screams and epithets get shrill, and the threats frightening. Today, I saw something even more terrible, though — family members who blamed not you but themselves.

They fell onto David like supplicants, the three of them, enchaining him inside their arms, all of them crying and saying things that made no sense but yet made perfect sense if you understood the circumstances.

I put the .38 away and leaned against George Pennyfeather’s car and smoked a cigarette and rubbed at my nose to get some feeling back into it. I wanted it to be spring and I wanted David Pennyfeather to have the opportunity for a decent life that Paul Heckart had denied him. I wanted the sun to shine and the quack of strutting ducks to be heard on the shoreline and the laughter of swimmers in the blue river to be sprinkled like gold dust on the day. I wanted Faith to be all right.

I was lost to my own thoughts when it happened, and it happened so quickly nobody could do anything about it.

He broke from them with great and overpowering force and ran to the edge of the woods, all the time tugging something from inside his blue down jacket. I saw what was about to happen, but there was no way I could stop it. He raised the gun to his face and set it against his temple. Then, in obscene slow motion, the gun fired. David’s head jerked away just as the gun kicked in his hand. The roar was incredible and seemed to echo for many minutes.

David died later that evening, after telling his mother and sister what had gone on. He had killed Jankov because Jankov had one day made a remark about what had taken place between Paul Heckart and David. And David was only too happy to let his father go to prison for the murder. David, in his blind rage, held his father responsible for Paul Heckart’s molesting him. Paul had been, after all, his father’s friend.

For twelve years David had been in psychotherapy. Curiously, he never told the therapist about Paul Heckart... but David did manage to sublimate his anger. Then when his father was freed from prison, David began killing everyone associated with Paul Heckart and the porno ring. He killed Conroy, the private detective, because Conroy was about to go to the press with everything he’d found out. A PI who breaks a porno ring involving prominent citizens will find himself inundated with new clients.

George Pennyfeather sat in his living room listening to all this as if Carolyn were relating it in a language other than English. He didn’t seem to quite understand — until, without warning, he began sobbing. They sat on either side of him, his wife and his daughter, taking turns holding him and rocking him gently the way they would an infant.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ,” he said, a small man with a small sorrowful voice.

There didn’t seem much else to say.